Pillars of Eternity 2 barrelling on through stretch goals

Following the launch of its crowdfunding campaign on Thursday, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire [official site] reached its goal in one day and has already started barrelling through stretch goals. Turns out, quite a few folks are up for Obsidian continuing their fantasy RPG – this time with pirates aplenty. Our own John declared the first game “A wonderful, enormous and spellbinding RPG, gloriously created in the image of BioWare’s Infinity classics, but distinctly its own.” I’ll have to quiz him on pirates.Pillars 2 will take the game to the Deadfire archipelago, a string of islands ranging in climate from deserts to tropics, on the tail of an awakened god. The basic pitch is: Pillars but in new lands, prettier, and with a more-alive world.

As I write this, the Pillars 2 crowdfunding campaign on Fig is just under $1.7 million (£1.35 million). The initial goal was $1.1 million (£0.9m). As well as the usual ‘fling money at people’ crowdfunding method, Fig lets people actually financially invest in projects. The current breakdown is about $900k in pledges and $800k investment.

Pillars 2 has already hit stretch goals to add sub-classes, a level cap boost, and a Russian localisation. Next up is a monk companion and an expansion of the AI settings introduced with Pillars’ expansion. Obsidian explain in an update:

“With this addition, you can customize AI behaviors with a visual UI allowing for the fine tuning spell-casting and ability use. For example, the order that an AI casts spells in can be defined and conditional logic can be set for each spell. This gives you the power to preset combat AI for Wizards, Priests, and Ciphers based on a variety of gameplay conditions.”

Sounds good! I’ve not played Pillars but I did enjoy building intricate scripts in Dragon Age games, making autonomous party members with builds far more clever than I’d ever be bothered to micromanage.

Though do bear in mind that stretch goals are as volatile as any other part of a crowdfunded game, as I’ll get into with the next post I write in 3-2-1-go!